Fire detection systems and other monitoring and alarm systems routinely include a large number of monitoring nodes distributed in a building or other space. The monitoring nodes monitor their surrounding environment and trigger an alarm when a specified condition is detected.
In some systems, monitoring nodes communicate wirelessly with each other and with a centralized monitoring and alarm station. Conventional monitoring and alarm systems that support wireless communications often use battery-operated monitoring nodes with narrowband radios. These monitoring nodes can form a wireless mesh network, which allows the monitoring nodes to monitor a large area.
Unfortunately, monitoring nodes implemented in this manner typically support lower data rate protocols that suffer from bandwidth limitations, which result in reduced network capacity and increased detection and activation latency. Mesh networks implemented using these types of monitoring nodes also typically cannot support higher data rate applications, such as voice or video transport. Moreover, many mesh communication protocols do not implement or support any standard IEEE 802.11 security protocols and require overhead to support the use of routing protocols. In addition, it is typically difficult to implement and manage time synchronization across monitoring nodes and to manage time slot-based communications in a large mesh network, and the mesh network is often more susceptible to interference. These factors negatively impact the stability of the network.